Well, I admit, that statement is an exaggeration. But really, just Google the word “how to be famous” and you have millions of websites and spamsites dedicated to “help you grow famous”.

This post is NOT a guide to teach you how to become a famous person, no, I don’t know how to do that because I’m NOT famous. But here’s an exploration of why being famous can be good.

You should know by now there are plenty of stories to hear on this blog. Here’s another one. ;)

Art, or fart?

My last post on Hyperminimalism Writing had gotten some pretty interesting comments. Many commented that it sounds like a Tweet or how things is nicer to be kept short and simple, but here’s one that caught my attention:

Sounds more like a riddle to me…or…well…the author is just too plain lazy. :p

No deny to that, really. We can’t say that he’s wrong, because to everyone of us with the average eye and mind, it does sound like crap and the author is freaking lazy to come up with crap.

But, lets make an assumption that Bill Gates one day say, “I like Hyperminimalism.” One single word will result in speculation across the net with thousands of tweets and retweets every minute scrutinizing the sentence from head to tail.

The Fountain

Almost one hundred year ago, a man submitted a urinal to an arts exhibition and requested for it to be exhibited. He named the urinal as “The Fountain“, and his rationale behind the artwork is on Dadaism philosophy, which disregards traditional notions of art and calling his Fountain “found art”.

It was rejected.

But that doesn’t stop from it launching Marcel Duchamp into fame. His Dada movement peers were angered by the rejection, and instead of making Marcel a fool of the time, he got famous as an avant-garde which made a major contribution in the 20th century arts movment.

The point is, if Duchamp did not have the network of friends and the level of fame he has around his friends at the art scene as a Post-Impressionist artist, he would not have survived the attack as he would be so lack of supporters. With a bit of fame and networking, it’s different.

You know what an editorial said about why Duchamp’s The Fountain is so important?

“Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”

Well, let’s not care about how that contributes to the art scene and how is that affecting the art philosophy today.

Our focus here is Duchamp’s fame: if it wasn’t because of Duchamp’s fame before, nobody could have given a shit about what he did, let alone defend Duchamp’s feats. Enough said.

So, do you want to be famous now?

Or do you already want to be famous? ;)

Today if you have a very famous blog or Tweet, you are pretty much guaranteed a good living from all the advertising offers or endorsements or free iPhones and Nexus One being given out for you to test. Not to mention you’ll probably have a few thousand followers watching your back, tweeting (pun intended) about your good moves and clattering about your bad ones.

Famous Spiderman quote, “With great power comes great responsibility.” But oh, power is something so hard to resist.

With the Internet and today’s development in social networking, being famous is a matter of strategy, time, and of course, luck. But I am not going to teach you how to, because I am not famous neither, and without the fame and authority whatever I said does not weight as much as what the people at Mashable said. ;)

Do you have anything to say about people trying to be famous? Or what’s your take on today’s fight for fame?

Well after pondering for a few days I’ve been thinking what else interesting can I write about after my Thailand trip. It was all shopping, food, night life, and everything is just as any other trip.

And I’m sure too much of food porn and shopping showoffs will make you think that I’m an asshole.

So instead of talking about those materialistic achievements and how my waist have grown three inches after my Bangkok trip, I looked back at my tweets during my time in Bangkok and I’ve found this:

I saw a secondary schoolboy doing maths homework with his iPhone, his girlfriend next to him at the foodcourt of Siam Paragon.

A companion of mine commented when he saw this during the trip, “It’s not just about the efficiency of the work, it’s also about the style of how you work!”

So really, how true is that?

Yep, he’s a secondary school boy, 15, or 16 at most, flipping and tinkering around his iPhone while writing his maths answers onto the textbook. While his girlfriend is using her brains most of the time, she takes a peep whenever she gets a chance.

All in a high class shopping mall’s food court, Siam Paragon, which you can compare to our Kuala Lumpur’s Pavilion shopping mall.

That really leaves me pondering.

So you have a normal calculator and you have the iPhone at hand. If given the choice, most of us will choose the iPhone because it’s more efficient.

Or is it?

You can click on the buttons just as good as you click on a normal calculator. But clicking on an iPhone makes you feel better, doesn’t it? The eye candy, the swoosh and swirls and the scrolls and fades, and ooh not to mention the stares of jealousy and envy when people walk around you. That can make you feel real good.

So you can make phone calls and send sms with just any cheap handphone. Why choose an iPhone or Satio?

So you can cook just any dish just as good with a cheap Ikea non-stick pan. Why get a Buffalo Pan?

So you can always get the help of your brother or sister or your wife or husband to help you relieve the pain at your back with some good massage. Why get an Osim massage chair?

So you can just get a simple laptop at a cheap price at the store. Why get a Lenovo or HP or Dell?

Because really, no matter how much you want to deny it, style does play a role in your purchase decisions, because working with style and doing things with style makes you feel good.

So much for our rational decision making, hmm?

But then, this is what drives the consumerist society around. The need of luxury for self-realization and a reaffirmation of self values.

Do you agree that we not only strive to work efficiently, we want to work stylishly as well? And sometimes, even efficiency is compromised, we just plain wanna look stylish!

Hmm, excuse me while I go drool at the Google’s new phone Nexus One. Damn it’s so cool, I wanna get one!

As a devoted Netizen we use emoticons everyday. Of course you use them too, right? It’s much more easier to just do a :) compared to doing *smiles* or D8< to doing *I’M GODDAMN ANGRY*.

Well I got kinda interested in the world of Emoticons, and as I dwell further into researching about it, the emoticon world is really far bigger than what we think!

There are probably hundreds of emoticons out there, and what we use is just like 3-5% of them!

Yup, the MSN or Yahoo emoticons aren’t just the only emoticons you can find. You can emote even better using your own keyboard!

So come in here to learn a little history about Emoticons, the difference between Western and Eastern Emoticons and have a look at the list of Emoticons around the world!

It all started during the 1970s

When the Internet was born and all the emails are flying around the world, people eventually felt the need to express themselves better than *OMG I’M SO HAPPY NOW*. There were little support for graphics like that time (yeah, we live in a lucky generation with MSN emoticons!) and all they have were the typographic tools of the keyboard.

So a guy named Kevin Mackenzie at 1979 proposed that the punctuations of our keyboard to be used as means of gesture and facial expression. He wrote that:

In regard to your message a few days ago concerning the loss of meaning in this medium:

I am new here, and thus hesitate to comment, but I too have suffered from the lack of tone, gestures, facial expressions etc. May I suggest the beginning of a solution? Perhaps we could extend the set of punctuation we use, i.e:

If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so:

“Of course you know I agree with all the current
administration’s policies -).”

The “-)” indicates tongue-in-cheek.

At first Kevin proposed this as a joke, and we don’t really use the “-)” expression to mean “tongue-in-cheek” really today, personally I don’t really see the connection. :P But apparently the Net had taken it as a great suggestion and since then, emoticons begin to take a life of its own.

The Western Emoticons — :-)

So, as for when did the colon, hash and the close bracket become the basis that means “a smiley face” has not been properly recorded in the history of men (aka. Wikipedia), but well Wikipedia did record how the emoticon kinda works.

As the Western language, commonly English or other European languages typically reads from left to right, it makes sense for an emoticon to be registered from left to right too. So you will see the : represents the eye, the - representing the nose and ) representing the mouth. Like, well, this!

Well, as lazy Netizens eventually we’ve decided to take off the nose all together, and that leaves us this:

In case you still haven’t get it, well just lean your head to the left of your shoulder and you should be able to see the faces there. See the eyes there and the mouth doing all the different expressions? Yup, that’s it! :D

Which leads us to another main characteristic of the Western emoticon, is that they emphasize a lot on the use of the mouth to tell an expression. Without the mouth you can’t really tell what are you trying to emote with just two dots, right? So here are even more variations of the Western emoticons:

And hundreds of others more! With just a few combination of keys you can make so many faces, now isn’t that the wonders of emoticons? :D

The Eastern Emoticons — ^__^

Well the Net is a global thing, and global is all about cultures! While the Western people made so many cute faces by looking sideways, the Eastern people preferred to just show a face straight on, without having to tilt the head! This is also partially influenced by the East-asian languages such as Chinese, Korean and Japanese which reads each word as a block, instead of alphabets. So here’s how some famous Eastern-influenced emoticons look like:

As you’ve noticed by now, the Eastern emoticons uses the eyes to tell an expression instead of the mouth, which is pretty different with the Western emoticons. So if you’re familiar enough with these type of emoticons, we can replace the mouth with a dot or omit the mouth altogether and come out with:

Now, isn’t emoticons beautiful!

Even more complex Emoticons

Well, apparently we Netizens are not satisfied enough with these easily created emoticons, and we wanted more, and more! So the king nerds had come up with these beautiful Emoticons that combines the ASCII art. To put it simply, these emoticons uses glyphs that exist in the computer world but cannot be typed on our keyboard easily! So these emoticons are popular in the Japanese forums as they are preset onto a database and all the users have to do is to apply them by pressing a button.

Well, don’t ask me how they did it, you probably know it better than I do!

Due to the limitations of the blog’s display language I couldn’t show this in a copyable format such as the ones above, sorry! But really, if your computer supports the language, you really can type these emoticons out! :D

Aren’t they really cool??

3 Letter Words Emoticon: OTZ

Well it may baffle a lot of us at first, but OTZ really is an emoticon. Well to the Eastern world, at least! I first heard of the word orz from a song by Mayday, and it’s only today that I’ve found out what does it mean!

If you tilt your head sizeways, imagine the “O” as a head, then you should be able to see a man like falling onto the ground, the “T” or “r” like the hands, and the “Z” or the “L” like the legs crunching on the ground. It’s like the pose when you do push-ups, but this is when you’re wayyy depressed and tired!

So when you’re very so T_____T, you can do OTZ or orz to show that you bow down to the person, either full salute, or no energy!

Whoever who made this up sure is a genius! STO!

Before we come to an end!

And phew, isn’t that a really long post! :D Well before we come to an end, imma leave this one emoticon for you to find out what does it mean!

Well, no prizes this time, but it’s for your amusement really. :P
Tips: It’s a 3 letter emoticon similar to OTZ!

Of course, leave your answer! I’d love to see what can you come up with!

So what are the emoticons that you use most frequently? ^__^

Are you a regular blog readers that comment on a lot of blogs, especially WordPress blogs (like Caramelz.my), and wonder why some people has some cool looking avatar image while you don’t?

I used to ask that question too! Having a profile image of yourself (avatar) wherever you go to any blog or forum and comment is pretty cool, right? You don’t have to upload one each time, and it makes your comment instantly recognizable!

For Blogger users, the avatar for the comments on Blogspot blogs comes from the profile image of your Blogger profile. But since WordPress blogs are growing in such widespread popularity, a smart guy created a system that recognizes an avatar to be displayed based on the mail you’ve typed in for your comments on any blog or forum, especially WordPress.

The smart guy is called Tom Werner, and the system is called Gravatar.

Dubbed “Globally Recognized Avatar”, Gravatar is the system used by most WordPress blogs to get a thumbnail image of yourself, your Avatar! Simple 3 minutes sign-up, and you can get an avatar like mine! Woohoo!

How does Gravatar work?

My Gravatar!

The idea is fairly easy. After you signed up on Gravatar, you will be able to assign an image thumbnail to an email account, so whenever you go comment on a blog or anywhere, and if the blog or anywhere supports Gravatar, it will retrieve the image from the Gravatar site and uses that as your avatar.

What’s more, you can have a number of different emails in one account, so you can actually assign a number of thumbnails to different emails, and when you use different emails to comment on different places they will appear as what you’ve assigned!

Lets say you got an email for the normal cheeky cheeky blogs, and you want to display an innocent image of yourself over there. Then you have an email specially for the kinky porn sites and you want to show your sexiest face there. Yurp, you can!

You can also assign the rating for your Gravatar for G rated to PG, R and X rated. Well, you know what they mean right? If you’re on a site that does not allow X rated Gravatar and you used the email accidently, Gravatar will automatically look for a G rated avatar that you’ve assigned to be used. Thank God!

Gravatar

So how to I get started

Well, as usual, lend me 3 minutes of your time and let this introduction video from Gravatar to show you how it works, and how to register an account.

Yurp, registration barely takes 5 minutes, and you will get an avatar image to be used everywhere! Well, at least for most WordPress blogs. ;)

If you got a Gravatar already but curious on how do you intergrate it to your blog to display the Gravatar of your readers on their comments, read here! Supports WordPress, Movable Type, Joomla, Drupal, and yes, even Blogger!

But why am I promoting Gravatar all the sudden?

Well, I’m an avid blog hopper, and I visit a number of blogs. Many times I see that the Gravatar on the comments are the famous grey anonymous guy for many commentators, so I guess a lot of people still don’t know about this service yet! It is a very useful service to get you easily recognized on many of the blogs, so why not get one?

In case you’re wondering, yes, the comments on Caramelz.my is Gravatar enabled, so if you want to see a picture of yourself other than the grey anonymous guy, consider getting a Gravatar account.

Actually, it’s my secret plot so that I can know how handsome and pretty my readers are who comments on this blog, but don’t tell anyone, okay?

I hope to see less grey commentators on my blog soon! :D

Google Wave seems to be the new buzzword these days. Everyone is talking about it, and apparently they can’t stop!

At least for the techies and the geeks, anyway. For most of us we still have no clue what is Google Wave, and what can Google Wave do.

Well, spend 10 minutes with me and you will learn what is Google Wave, its features and what can it potentially do.

Edit: Google Wave invites has been given out! Thanks everyone for taking part! :D

Google Wave Logo

The 3 Minutes Overview

Google Wave is a new application developed by well, Google. To be put simply, Google Wave is a pimped email client with dozens of features that makes it much better than email. Among the things you can do with Google Wave is:

• Group conversations made easy by putting everyone in a same Wave
• Watching everyone typing and giving their input on a subject in real time (yes, you can actually see them typing out word by word!)
• Having all participants to be able to edit and change contents, similar to a Wiki. This will definitely be a plus for meetings or business emails! No more sending emails here and there with “updates”, make your updates real time in each Wave!
• Share and embed rich media such as pictures, videos and even maps by simply drag and drop
• Use Gadgets, applications created for Google Wave to add even more interactivity such as games, maps and others. Gadgets are shared by everyone in a Wave, so you don’t have to install anything. Cool eh?
• Use Robots, a bot of sorts to make your email and online life easier. Robots are AI that you can add as a contact and interact with to perform tasks, such as Wikipedia, dictionary, translator, spell-check, trivia and all other things

Google Wave Interface

That’s just part of what Google Wave can do, and it can potentially do much more! It can revolutionize the whole idea of emailing and make interactions in both personal and business situations must easier and intuitive.

You’ve just spent 3 minutes to get an overview of what is Google Wave. Now, spend another 7 minutes to watch these videos and you will have a clearer idea of what Google Wave can do!

What is Google Wave In Plain English

15 Features of Google Wave

Yup, that’s it!

Clear enough? Now you don’t have to spend hours trying to look up the Wiki or watching the 1 hour 20 mins presentation to know what is Google Wave. :)

Further resources on Mashable.com to get you started on Google Wave:

• HOW TO: Get Started with Google Wave
• Google Wave: A Complete Guide
• Google Wave Tag Search

And if that’s still not enough, every 10 seconds there are 20 new tweets about Google Wave. Just be patient and you will strike gold!

How about the 6 free invites you promised?!

Edit: Event is over! Thanks everyone for taking part! :D

Ah yes, yes, I am giving out 6 free invites for Google Wave. In case you don’t know, Google Wave is currently still on beta stage, thus many of the users are by invites only. So if you want to be one of the forefront of Google Wave users, here’s your chance!

While I would love to give it to you just like that, I’d want to make sure as well that you will put the invite to good use and test it to the max! So it’ll definitely help if you’re an active web user and get on Google Wave with me! :D

So here’s the challenge if you want to get your invite to Google Wave. Answer these 3 easy questions, and if you get them right you will get your passes!

But if there are more than 6 person that answers them correctly, I guess I will have to do a lucky draw to see who are the lucky guys and girls that gets the passes. Give the correct answer and you will stand a chance!

Here they come!

1. What’s the difference between boxer briefs and trunks in men’s underwear?
2. What is my Dad’s comment on my blog post about beautiful Vietnamese girls on Facebook?
3. Whose concert have I watched recently, and how long did the concert last?

Deadline: 4th December 11.59pm (Wed) @ Malaysian Time (+8GMT)

Thats it! Easy right? All the answers are on this blog on Caramelz.my, you just have to look around! Start from this page itself! :D

Submit your answers as comments below, remember to put in a valid email so that I can send your Google Wave invite to you if you’re the winner!

If you are kind enough, share this post with your friends too so that they can learn what is Google Wave as well as stand a chance for an invite! Just click on Twitter Retweet or Facebook Share on top of this post.

Happy Waving! :D

We all know how much of a pain-in-the-ass every time when you formatted your PC or upgraded to a newer OS and you have to download and install EVERYTHING again.

Well, not anymore with Ninite. Automated installation with all the common PC softwares are just a few button clicks away, most of all, it’s hassle-free, spyware-free, clicks-free, and it’s FREE!

Installing software shouldn’t require work

Ninite is a free applicated developed by Patrick Swieskowski and Sascha Kuzins. They made a manifesto in their website that everyone will agree on: Installing software shouldn’t require work.

Damn right! How much time had you spent on downloading and installing every single software, clicking on windows, checking if they will install an obnoxious toolbar on your browser and waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Especially during these times when there are thousands of happy users switching from Windows Vista to Windows 7, if you add all those clicking involved I’m sure you can hear it all the way from the moon.

“Ninite installs apps with default settings and says “no” to browser toolbars and other junk.

Ninite checks your PC’s language and 64-bit support to install the latest, best version of each app.

Ninite runs on Windows XP/Vista/7 and works in the background 100% hands-free.

All Ninite does is install the apps you choose. Not even Ninite is installed.”

Sounds too good to be true? Well to see if it’s really that good, I’ve tested it and here I am to show you how it works.

It’s pretty easy to use Ninite. (We can skip the Getting Started part… Because there’s no getting started, you just open and use it)

Select the softwares you want

Ninite -- Easy PC Software Setup

Click Get Installer

Ninite -- Easy PC Software Setup

Let Ninite do its magic

Ninite -- Easy PC Software Setup

That’s it!

Ninite -- Easy PC Software Setup

Ninite really does run in the background, downloads and installs all your software silently without obstructing you playing, cooking or farming in Facebook. When it’s all done you will see all the shortcuts of the softwares you’ve chosen to install on your desktop waving at you yelling, “I’m DONE!”

Now, you don’t have to go through the painstaking process of downloading and installing every single software you want to have on your PC, when you can just get them from Ninite. Cool, huh!

Try it out and let me know how did it go!